This is one aspect of my PhD journey I haven’t discussed with many people but it’s one of the biggest contributors to my disappointment with PhD from DU. I joined PhD at a time when residency period of 2 years was mandatory. This meant we could not take up any full time work during this…
That (dreaded) age!
So I met a few of my college friends on Sunday. We attended our college reunion for sometime and then went out for a loooong lunch to have our own private reunion. We reminisced, joked around, asked for and gave career advice, and had plenty of food. We laughed, a lot. We talked until we…
PhD Diary #4
Have I told you how amazing my PhD supervisor is? No? Well she is the best. I couldn’t have had a better mentor, for PhD and for life! It’s her birthday today and I can’t help but go down the memory lane to be grateful for the thousands of opportunities she has given me and…
Spring is here!
Spring is here finally. For me, spring arrives when I switch on the fan for the first time in the year, and that happened only this last week. I’m sure everyone has experienced the unmistakable pleasure of draping the blanket while the fan is on at full speed. That’s where I am these days. Every…
Book Review: Educated
This book is many things but unputdownable has to be the first adjective for it in my review. Rarely have I come across anything as compelling as this, and absolutely none in the non-fiction genre. This book demanded to be read in a single sitting, and if I were a few years younger I definitely…
Book Review: Joyful
This is a delightful book written by a designer interested in exploring how we can bring more joy into our lives. The author Ingrid Fetell Lee is a designer and in this book that she wrote over a span of 8 years, she discusses 10 ‘aesthetics of joy’. The book stems from the idea that…
World Pakhala Day
I have to admit right at the outset that I didn’t know a World Pakhala Divas actually exists. I just found out, literally 10 minutes ago. I spent a good 5 minutes lamenting the fact that I haven’t had it since a year and planning to make it for lunch tomorrow, and another 5 minutes…
How to beat the Hedonic Treadmill
In the last post, I mentioned hedonic adaptation and hedonic treadmill- how we adapt to the good and the bad, and come back to our baseline level of happiness soon enough. This is reflected in most of us having the kind of life today that we might not have even dreamt of a few years…
Yesterday’s luxuries, today’s necessities
“Yesterday’s luxuries become today’s necessities, and then tomorrow’s relics”. Truer words haven’t been spoken. Give us humans anything in plentiful supply and soon it ceases to be special. We get used to things, even the really wonderful things we had pined for, and hardly notice them after a point. My bedroom balcony, my new gadgets…
Book Review: Flow- The Psychology of Optimal Experience
I knew about the concept of Flow long before I started reading this book last year, and finding the first few chapters stating what I knew very well I abandoned this book in the middle. That was a mistake. On picking it up a couple of weeks ago to give it another go, I realized…
A Rain of Moments 